NVIDIA Tegra 4i quad-core SoC unveiled with integrated 4G-LTE modem

NVIDIA has recently unveiled Tegra 4i quad-core SoC for smartphones, the name is identical to the recent announced Tegra 4 SoC but in real the Tegra 4i is designed on the pattern of older Tegra 3 SoC with some new inputs. The new NVIDIA’s Tegra 4i SoC has integrated 4G-LTE modem which was absent in the latest Tegra 4 chipset, on the other side, the new Tegra 4i chipset is a bit less powerful than the mighty Tegra 4.

The all new Tegra 4i SoC is half in size than the competitors which results more battery life of the device and the chipset is especially designed for smartphones which supposedly means there is no room for Tegra 4i in the upcoming tablets. The new Tegra 4i SoC has 4 plus 1 Cortex-A9 architecture, which includes a single core for saving the battery life while four other cores boast the performance. The maximum clock speed of the CPU is 2.3GHz, however, developers can overclock a bit to get more power. There is a room for up to 2GB of LPDDR3 RAM in the Tegra 4i SoC, comparing with the Tegra 4, it supports less multitasking because the earlier launched SoC has up to 4GB DDR3L and LPDDR3 RAM support. For graphics capabilities, Tegra 4i has 60 cores GPU which is claimed to be 6 times more powerful than the GPU on Tegra 3.

NVIDIA Tegra 4 lineup

On the part of video output, the Tegra 4 supports up to 4K (UltraHD) resolution while the Tegra 4i only supports up to 1920 × 1200 pixels resolution, of course that much resolution is enough for the smartphones. For photography, NVIDIA Tegra 4 SoC lineup uses Computational Photography Chimera which gives a mode as ‘always on HDR’ for HDR recording along with HDR panorama support.

The all new Tegra 4i quad-core SoC is expected to be available in the end part of this year, the mid-range smartphones will likely to be powered by the chipset and launched in the first quarter of the year 2014.